Bramshaw (Manor)

Bramshaw Golf Club can trace its origins back to 1880 though it was another decade before golfers competed for the first monthly Gold Medal, with fourteen players taking part in this event. Appropriately enough, it was retired Royal Navy Lieutenant Philip Augustus Champion de Crespigny, the man who set out the original Forest course, who won this inaugural competition.

The club became a limited company in 1953, with Sir Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre and his family becoming the new owners, and they have been at the helm ever since then, steering the club through good times and bad. A second course, the Manor, was designed by club professional Wilf Wiltshire and built on an adjacent property at the start of the 1970s and a new clubhouse followed in 1983.

The largely bunkerless Forest course, the oldest golfing layout in Hampshire, provides a fun round of golf at Bramshaw but more serious golfers will probably prefer to play the 6,400-yard Manor course, which is laid out on land on the other side of the 200 year-old Bell Inn, the former clubhouse that now operates as a 26-bedroomed hotel with bar and restaurant.

The Manor course has matured into a fine parkland layout, featuring tight, tree-lined holes that offer a real test of golf to players of all abilities. There may be only thirty or so bunkers dotted around this layout but they’re well-positioned, especially around the greens, where wayward approach shots will be suitably punished by these sand traps.

Notable holes on the Manor front nine include the 410-yard 3rd, a long and narrow par four requiring an approach shot to be threaded between two oaks situated a hundred yards from the green, and the intriguing 188-yard 9th, a par three with a green fronted by a strategically-positioned circular bunker which forms the “clapper” of the bell-shaped putting surface.

Two of the first three holes on the inward half are slightly right doglegged short par fours and both present decent birdie opportunities. The 352-yard 14th also bends right to the target but this hole’s a far tougher proposition as a ditch cuts across the fairway at the point where it veers at a 45-degree angle to a left-to-right sloping green.

The course, the club and the on-site Bell Inn, New Forest are now owned by Stellar Asset Management in partnership with Ben Blackburn Golf, following the purchase of the businesses in August 2021